Laboratory evaluation of the complex interplay between whole-body vibration and spinal posture

全身振动(WBV)影响重型移动机械操作员，对7%的劳动力来说是一个重大的健康风险。不同的工业环境，例如采矿和林业环境，振动暴露各不相同。工业座椅是一种可以有效减少振动暴露的工程控制措施，但我们观察到，个别座椅最适合在特定的振动环境中衰减WBV-它们并不是在所有应用中都能以最佳方式工作。我开发了一种座位选择算法，用于将座位与振动环境相匹配，这是我上一次获得探索奖助金时开发的。然而，座椅只是复杂工作环境的一个组成部分。车辆操作员经常采用笨拙的姿势，如颈部和躯干旋转，以获得安全操作车辆所需的视野。姿势直接影响振动在身体中的传递。例如，脊柱姿势影响生物动力学反应，如表观质量和座位到头部的振动传递率。 这项建议的第一个短期目标是评估在真实的职业任务模拟中身体姿势对他们生物动力学反应的影响。这种方法的关键方面包括使用我们当前的虚拟现实叉车模拟器在现实模拟下执行这一分析。振动是使用机器人平台产生的，车辆座椅和控制与工业车辆匹配，视觉环境使用虚拟现实模拟，工作场所任务使用游戏软件引擎模拟。该项目将专注于开发信号处理方法，用于对特定姿势的生物动力学测量进行加窗处理，类似于不同类别身体姿势的短时傅立叶变换。这种方法将表征诸如随着激励幅度的增加而表现出的软化等元素。 这项建议的第二个目标是评估性别和人体测量学在真实模拟职业任务时对生物动力学反应的影响。这是一个重要的问题，原因有两个：它直接关系到这项研究计划的长期目标，即了解振动能量是如何在人体内传递和衰减的，以及它将确定可能影响加拿大工业中越来越多的女性工人的不同潜在风险因素。 这一建议的新颖之处在于结合了基础科学方法来量化对全身振动的生物动力学响应，以及身体姿势的影响，同时在高生物保真度的虚拟工作场所环境中进行这些研究。这是一项重要的发展，对车辆工程和人体工程学都有影响，并可能对减轻加拿大工业中全身振动伤害的负担产生广泛的影响。

Whole-body vibration (WBV) affects heavy mobile machinery operators and is a significant health risk for 7% of the workforce. Vibration exposures vary between industrial environments, for example between mining and forestry environments. Industrial seats are one engineering control measure that can effectively reduce vibration exposures, but we have observed that individual seats are best-suited to attenuate WBV in specific vibration environments - they do not work optimally in all applications. I developed a seat selection algorithm for matching seats with vibration environments within my last Discovery Grant. However, the seats are merely one component of the complex workplace environment. Vehicle operators frequently adopt awkward postures, such as neck and trunk rotations, in order to gain the necessary field of view to safely operate the vehicle. Posture directly influences the transmission of vibrations through the body. For example, spinal posture influences the biodynamic responses such as apparent mass and the seat-to-head vibration transmissibility. The first short-term goal of this proposal is to evaluate the influence of body posture on their biodynamic response during realistic simulation of occupational tasks. The key aspects of this approach include performing this analysis under realistic simulations using our current virtual reality forklift simulator. The vibrations are produced using a robotic platform, the vehicle seating and controls match the industrial vehicle, the visual environment is simulated using virtual reality, and the workplace tasks are simulated using a gaming software engine. This project will focus on developing signal processing methods for windowing the biodynamic measures to specific postures, similar to Short Time Fourier Transforms for different categories of body posture. This approach will characterize elements such as the apparent softening with increasing excitation amplitude. The second objective of this proposal is to evaluate the influence of gender and anthropometrics on biodynamic responses during realistic simulation of occupational tasks. This is an important issue for two reasons: it directly relates to the long-term goal of this research program of understanding how vibration energy is transmitted and attenuated in humans, and it will identify the different potential risk factors that may affect the growing number of female workers in Canadian industry. The novelty of this proposal is combining the basic science approach to quantify biodynamic responses to whole-body vibration, and the influence of body posture, whilst performing these studies in a high-biofidelity virtual workplace environment. This is an important development with implications for both vehicle engineering and ergonomics, and may have broadly reaching implications for reducing the burden of whole body vibration injuries in Canadian industry.